Enh. BOR-RING! 28 December 2006

For what it is worth, which is not a great deal… Balz on the Edwards announce (which will be shown on C-Span 1 tonight at 8 ET). What I have caught of the announce, well, it is leaden. Very heavy, airless pastry.

In his e-mail, Edwards said he chose to announce in New Orleans because it demonstrates the power people have to build America when they take responsibility instead of leaving it to Washington.

I don’t even know where to begin with that one. The failure was the government’s ..willfully abandoning people, before and after Katrina and the ”topping” of the levees, to the enforced destruction of a city (and a coastal region). THEN the neglect, both malignant and planned, to destroy any sort of decent partnership with citizens’ efforts to rebuild their city, their home.

People should NOT be left to the “mercies” of churches, corporations, criminal business practices (I defy ANYONE to make sense of what the insurance companies are doing in NO, what a fucked mess) the [Southern White Christian Government Compliant] Red Cross. They need a responsive government, where the various vagueries of “charity” is an “also”…. and not the savior of first, second, third and last resort.

Last but scarcely least, I read recently that as of close of November, Edwards had less than 21K COH… further, his campaign still had debts from 2004 of 300K.

Oh yes, early days… I always think back to an early outing of Kerry’s in NH in the dark, cold, winter days of the early primary efforts. He met with about 30 – 40 salt of the earth people, in the back dining room of a restaurant. One woman asked him about NAFTA and his vote (for it!). She also brought up the suffering in the town from lost jobs. He barely looked at her and she sat directly in front of the small corner of the room from which he addressed the gathering. He delivered senatese. And he appeared bored. I was disgusted.

I never saw that much changed from then to the conclusion on Nov 3.

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On the other hand, Glen Ford at BAR has up an overview of some of the bubbling stories, and a few predictions. I do agree with his view of Obama and Hillary (what a pair).

[O]bama took great pains early in his term to convince senior Democrats he would be a team player. The question is, Whose team? All indications are that, politically, he’s on the Hillary/Bill Clinton Democratic Leadership Council team. Indeed, the editors of Black Agenda Report have for some time strongly suspected that Barack and Hillary are playing presidential tag-team, in order to hold down the top two funding and popularity slots in the Democratic primary race. The longer the duo can keep this up, the poorer the rest of the field’s prospects.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), trading on star power, the capacity to raise tens of millions of dollars with relative ease and an ability to dominate media attention, are rewriting the script of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, driving potential rivals to the sidelines and casting a huge shadow over all others who may run.”

It takes courage to run the two-year-long, grueling race for president. Since setting foot on Capitol Hill, Obama has shown great stamina, but nothing in the way of an inclination to challenge entrenched power – and in the Democratic Party, the Clintons ARE power. Obama’s voting record is less progressive than that of his senior senatorial colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin. Rhetorically – and all we hear from Obama is the blandest of rhetoric – he more closely resembles…Hillary. [snip]

There is more, but that gets to the nut. They appear apart, but may likely (or surely) end up together. Makes as much sense as anything…

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UPDATE, 1:30 PM

On the subject of “BOR-RING!”:

Oh Honeeee! Did not all of Kos’ frantic, reactionary diatribes (for years now) get the “You Hippie!, You!” accusers off your [collective] back?

Speaking personally as the child of two very non-radical apolitical middle class professionals (both of whom grew up in the 1960s), it’s been quite frustrating to essentially be called a dirty hippy for opposing the way that power lies and insults us. Chris has documented the way that new progressives are called emotional children with no credibility by mainstream pundits and old leftie types alike. This is a result of many forces, and one of them is ignorance. They don’t know who we are and they don’t know how we can possibly differ ideologically from the 1968 convention protesters. And while there are those among us who know and have been through those fights, until recently I wasn’t really aware of the 1960s experience except through the hollow and annoying shell of the single-issue groups and a legacy of a shattered and self-hating collection of frightened liberal politicians. [snip]

Seems not. Stoller has up another of his long, interminable wheezes on The Sixties, The Left, New and Otherwise. In fairness, following the first toe dip in the boiling stew of still living history, he seemed to get a thing or two from the replies, emails and reading lists.

But it faded fast:

[N]ow, there certainly are latent movements that exist in parallel, such as the immigrant rights movement, but there’s very little direct interaction between the immigrant rights community and us. I expect this to change as the forces that have created us are quite massive and are empowering reformers in other communities – it’s only a matter of time before we form alliances. But race came first in the 1960s, then came the stupid war. The opposite is true for us. […]

There’s a lot more, obviously, and I still don’t have a totally clear organizational framework. [don’t fret, no one does! -Mcat]

I will say that the most obvious and probably most important difference is that the 1960s white left was a political and cultural reaction to top-down liberalism, whereas we are most directly a reaction to right-wing extremism.[snip snappy!]

Which makes y’all what you are: Male White Centrists! One commenter suggests he read Noam Chomsky… but I wonder if he will.

The sad thing is how much the commenters buy into the notion that the online elections apparatchiks are a “movement”…

Oh sure, I am laughing. What else is new?

****************************************************

Ooops! Almost forgot this rather troubling comment. The poster should chill with the yearning and worry, she/he WANTS what amounts to corporate leadership for the nation.

I’d like to see older and newer generation liberals give up on the yearning for the charismatic leader. He will not appear. He is JFK, MLK, and RFK, and he is not coming back. We are the leaders we yearn for because we are democracy. Don’t yearn for the other, the savior, the adored one. Just. don’t. do. it. It’s very very bad for us and prevents us from forming a more perfect union and hiring a competant, experienced, intelligent, skilled CEO of our country’s government, our president.

The corporate model is well in place. Strange that s/he thinks it is any saner [how could it be?] than the fixers on view…

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UPDATE, 5:20 pm

hmmm. Listening to Edwards speak from NO this am… the part he is on now is that ”America must be the stablising force in the world”.

[N]o, the clue from Edwards’ morning appearances comes from what he says about Iraq. “First,” he told his many questioners this a.m., “tell the truth about how we got here.” Senator Edwards, until you tell the truth about what happened to New Orleans–the truth clearly eluciated by three separate forensic engineering teams and then, belatedly, reluctantly confirmed by the Corps itself in June of this year, the truth that New Orleans was leveled not by a natural disaster but by arguably criminal negligence–your use of the city as a backdrop reminds me not of any of your political heroes. It reminds me of Anderson Cooper.

By the way, who’s he keeping honest these days?

UPDATE: I’ve now seen Edwards’ official announcement speech on C-SPAN. His failure to tell the truth about New Orleans just becomes more glaring: most of the good things that have happened there, he says, have been because of the volunteers who’ve come to town. What’s unsaid: that the volunteers can’t speed up the government and contractors who fail to execute their basic obligations. Most of the good things in New Orleans are, in fact, being done by individuals and community groups precisely because of the abject lack of “good things” being done by responsible agencies. If Edwards doesn’t believe government should work, he should say so. [snip]

[F]or example, there’s the New York Times blithely captioning the locale as “the backyard of a victim of Hurricane Katrina.” Nary a single reference to the levee failures, which, the NYT reported in May, “were caused by flaws in design, construction and maintenance.”

“People didn’t die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle, and people didn’t die because the levees were overtopped,” said Raymond B. Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chief author of the report, [told the NYT].

“People died because mistakes were made,” he said, “and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost.”

That message was pretty much lost on most media outlets covering Edwards’ announcement, from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times. Not that Mr. Edwards himself seems to be deviating from the “meme”: I could find no reference to the defective levees at his website’s blog, just another repetition of the photo-op site as a “home was hit by Katrina.” Hmmm, before he turned to politics, didn’t Mr. Edwards take a great deal of professional interest in defective products and the havoc they wreak on ordinary people? But he takes no interest in the alleged culpability of the US Army Corps of Engineers? [snip]

Welll I just heard the whole of it from Edwards. It was glib and empty.

[T]his and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. Until now, the relationship between the two presidents has been portrayed largely as a matter of political necessity, with Nixon tapping Ford for the vice presidency in late 1973 because he was a confirmable choice on Capitol Hill.

But the tapes, documents and two lengthy recent interviews with Ford before his death this week, conducted for a future book and embargoed until after his death, show that the close political alliance between the two men seriously influenced Ford’s eventual decision to pardon Nixon, the most momentous decision of his short presidency and almost certainly the one that cost him any chance of winning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974; he pardoned Nixon just a month later. “I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill,” Ford said during the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

“I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford said in the interview. [snip]

Might as well laugh…couple of gang members, scratching each other’s backs. Close friends from the 40s.

********************************************************

oh and what is this with headlines that Ford opposed the war? Or thought it not justified? Tut, tut. How many mouths do pols have? The answer, as many as they need…

[F]ord was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He’d been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him,” he observed, “but we shouldn’t have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?” [snip]

Six Nations Want All Troops Out of Iraq

December 28, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – A majority of adults in five European countries and the United States believe the coalition effort should come to an end, according to a poll by Harris Interactive for France 24 and Le Monde. 90 per cent of respondents in France and 84 per cent of respondents in Spain support the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.

Britain is next on the list with 83 per cent, followed by Germany with 82 per cent, Italy with 77 per cent, and the U.S. with 66 per cent. [snip]

You notice they are all measurably smarter than we are… and it only took us FIVE FUCKING YEARS. As Afghanistan is poised to fall… Next.

[I]f it’s “foolish and unfair,” “irresponsibly provocative” and “dangerous and anti-Semitic” to make the apartheid comparison, then the roster of commentators who have gone awry is rather puzzling. For example, a major 2002 study of Israeli settlement practices by the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem concluded: “Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.” A more recent B’Tselem publication on the road system Israel has established in the West Bank again concluded that it “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime,” and even “entails a greater degree of arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa.” (7) [snip]

[T]he “Little Sister in the Frat House” image has come to me often while reading DKos. Since last year, when I suggested women’s issues to Gina as a topic for Yearly Kos and heard vague and conflicting responses from her – and then, after YKos, when there was a panel of some sort about feminism, but it hardly rated a mention afterwards, and none at all from the Front Pagers – I’ve been worried that feminists here are backing off and allowing their concerns to be subsumed into the “Bigger Picture”. I’m worried that feminists are yet again – as many of them were in the ’60s – allowing themselves to be the watercarriers, the coffee-makers, the toilet-scrubbers, the “support staff”, the cheerleaders, the strippers and sex toys to the Big Boys who are really the movers and shakers and the ones getting their ideas across.

Time and again I hear responses to the effect of:

“Yes, yes, we’re going to pay attention to your ideas and your issues when we get in power, but right now we have to focus on getting our people elected.” Can you get me another coffee, and by the way – nice tits! [snip]

Well, yes. There is a reason some of us are gone. I was there for political discussion. Had I wished, aspired to be a chew toy of sorts, well… LOL, as it happens, I did not. Others did.

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Don’t yearn for the other, the savior, the adored one. Just. don’t. do. it. It’s very very bad for us and prevents us from forming a more perfect union and hiring a competant, experienced, intelligent, skilled CEO of our country’s government, our president.

The very essence of triangulation… Where the hell was this fool two years ago with Kerry??? … What is BAD for Democrats is trying to get people to sell their vote to someone who will refuse to represent them… then, as usual, getting shocked when Dems loose… ONLY TO DO THE SAME DAMN THING THE NEXT ELECTION. The White Boyz are so enamored with the GOP way of doing “business”… yet refuse to acknowledge that the GOP supports and REWARDS its base.

we don’t put our bodies on the line in the form of mass protests. There’s just no point in doing so, since that doesn’t serve to stop reactionary forces from doing whatever they want.

No because you are all cowards!!! And you are only in “it”… for the thrill of the “game” and the prospect of making of lotsa of money where else can you earn such a living with such limited intellect…”hired hacks”

That Edwards decided to launch his “populist” campaign for the Democratic nomination with the standard “people not Washington” bullshit that wingers and libertarians have been using since the beginning of time to tell the poor to go fuck themselves is interesting in an “I think I’m going to puke now” kind of way.

Yeah, that “competence” line worked real well for Michael Dukakis in 1988.

There is, by the way, a older and much more radical version of at least part of the sentiment in that quote:

“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. (Applause.) I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.”

Can you imagine what he would have been like in a courtroom as an assistant DA, or whatever they call them in Michigan (state prosecutors, I think)? That he managed to graduate from any law school, much less Yale’s, is a mystery.

I’m pleased that it rattled the chains of so many DKos blowhards, including Markos himself. Now that was impressive, that I was able to lure the stoic and aloof Markos off of his high throne to battle in the ditch.

I’m a dangerous subversive, obviously.
Nobody is more dangerous than the person who tells the truth.by hrh on Fri Dec 29, 2006 at 06:19:23 AM PST

Miss Devore, that totally hits it on the head, the ‘little sister’ mentality. I was in a frat for my freshman year and high-tailed it after that. That’s one of many reasons why DKos gives me the total creeps. That thread is also a good reminder why i haven’t gone to that site in months.

thanks marisacat! I must say, my experience on DKos has made me realize how brutal totalitarian DICK-tatorships get started. There are so many little creeps who come running out of the shadows and clamor to join in the fascist fun.

I see no problems, though I do understand that lots of people can’t get past certain perceived contradictions.

It’s partly a problem of nomenclature, e.g. what’s the definition of “progressive”? Or even “social justice” for that matter.

by kos on Thu Dec 28, 2006 at 10:47:38 PM PST

Aside from making me vomit with his claim to be progressive (of course if one can make ones own reality I suppose it works…), I do have a question that has yet to be answered… I really wonder why winning elections is not seen as a “single issue” that is shrilly pushed by the purity trolls? That’s not a democracy, that’s a game show.

LOL I was banned August 2005. Wilfred and I were banned the same night.

I asked, as had someone else (Teresa in PA, as it happens) two nights before, I asked GregNYC if he was a staffer in the Shumer office. He had been a constant for months in the Pennachio threads, very disruptive (what else is there at that site?) and frankly it seemed very possible to me as I ruminated on TiPA’s asking him that very thing….

Whammo I was banned. It still stands as m y last comment. I link to my page at Kos in the left column here, in the Proud To be Banned thing…

Apparently Hunter discussed the banning and issue of “outing” the tender boyz (who are all but flashers anyway) on the FP (I never read it, frankly I never read Hunter, why start THEN?) as Boyz Must Be Protected. All it is is protect the party and the fucking hack Reid.

And I still maintian the FP is used for extortion: Play with us or we play back. Old stuff, old Dem party thuggery. Nothing is new in this deal.

Oh I am sure it was just an excuse (the GregNYC incident) after all TinPA was not banned for asking as well….

I am very independent and I sure did not grow up in some dog-like doctrinaire Democratic household. Democrats yes, doctrinaire bitches who show up to be bred, NO.

Later, a site I FPed at (after Theoria erased me at LSF in October 2005 – and I left there) had a sudden anonymous offer of subsidised “server moves” and I gathered I (and my using poodles as as stand-ins for party hacks) should “move along”.

“Btd” (a variant strain of an STD?) was so riled he had to take it to Cheers and Jeers today, because of his “community” concerns. They assessed him a killjoy. And he fought back with all the paranoia in his arsenal:

If we would be the Land of the Free, we must again become the Home of the Brave.
Justice Holmes: “When you strike at a King, you must kill him.”

by khereva on Fri Dec 29, 2006 at 10:17:30 AM PST”

but…well he can’t call them “Vichy Dems”, can he?

Uh-oh. It looks like they have introduced another “community building” feature there. No doubt to be attended by the same group that does top comments, the diary where they mojobate. The ostensible reason for these community features is to make newcomers welcome, but the reality for newcomers is to be slapped upside the head for a high UID, “And only 3 comments!”

Theoria booted you from LSF? I’m post-theoria to the blog world, but I am surprised given MITM support to you.

Oh-pea ess- you got it right about the curious demand from Edwards that citizens take responsibility for Katrina. I tried to rationalize it, interiorly, with the idea that things are so fucked up in this country that there is no “Winter Break” and waiting 110th to come charging in, but it did sound an off note to me.

well theoria erased me. October 25, 2005 iirc. GregNYC had sent me a vicious email (one of ten, I only opened the first) and I posted it. With a few slams.

Poor Theoria. He erased my entire post. and 122 comments. GregNYC, under the nom de guerre of “Howie”, friend to Greg LOL, was threatening legal action for the published email of GregNYC (can you follow the dirty slush as it runs thru the gutters?) DESPITE the fact that GregNYC freely published his AOL email at Dkos and at BMT.

The nom de guerre had no leg to stand on…

Madman removed the email addy but after he did that, Theoria erased the entire posting.

I had already decided to leave the minute I got a dismissive email from Theoria. Before he even erased me.

But he knew it would cause me to leave.

LOL I do have some standards. I don’t hang with chum in the water for the Big Boyz. Never possible to convince me that Theoria acted from mere “Blahger Pique”.

could figure out a way to stop fighting with each other all the time. You all have so much to say and even though I tend to agree more with you and jpete in general, I think you miss getting your voice heard as widely as possible because because of this ongoing bickering.
You are a tough broad hrh and I love that about you. Don’t get your butt banned.

As for sexism at dkos….of course it is rampant. This is a very male oriented sight and women are accepted and respected as long as you don’t argue for women’s issues. I do not think markos is sexist. Quite the opposite, he, is of the generation which doesn’t quite get it because it doesn’t effect him. That’s why he can think his position on single issue advocacy groups is a good one while I feel it is the one idea I vehemently disagree with him on.

bay… at the Edwards site he links to his Live Blog My Day In New Orleans. At DKos bien sur!

Scam… scams and cons.

I just caught Edwards on with Tweety. To solve our oil problems all the ”widdle peepul must stop being addcited”. Not a word about the Oil Patch Boyz in the WH or the endless kneel to the oil games in this country, for over 100 years!

HOW ABOUT SOME FUCKING INFRASTRUCTURE AND MODERN TRANSPORTATION MODES ???

Sorry it is all so old. Edwards used to bore me… he barely voted for half of his adult life, his first Dem convention was 00… I mean so involved, right?

as for LSF, I was sad to see Marisa go, but I think in the long run it resulted in this wonderful place, while Wilfred and I took over LSF when Theoria left shortly after scrubbing that piece. I look at it as an opportunity for Marisa and us to offer some much-needed sniping from TWO excellent fortified positions!

I used to have some hope for Edwards, but it was mostly a product of my own naivete and the standard issue junkie’s taste for silky smooth southern bullshit and a nice smile. What a waste. If I was intersted in the sort of slop he’s been pushing at his coming out party, I’d go drown myself in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. Cheap, waxy chocolate candy indeed.

There is no Sally. Hell, she probably has no husband or life for that matter.

This was an attack on you, Barb, mcjoan, Page, etc.

But my strong advice to all of you is to do what she does not want you to do – IGNORE her.

More at TalkLeft

by Big Tent Democrat on Thu Dec 28, 2006 at 11:21:35 PM PST

and my response:

A damning comment from Armando (2+ / 3-)
Recommended by:Thistime, Annalize5
Trollrated by:clonecone, MissLaura, Del C
He showed his hand there. He and his pack want people to think that I’m some kind of crazy loser. It’s significant that the attack is “she probably has no husband or life”. It’s very much the same tone as that old criticism of feminists: they’re ugly and they can’t get a man, so they hate all men.

As a matter of fact, I do have a husband. We’ve been married almost 20 years. He’s a successful surgeon with a PhD and a degree in music from an Ivy League college. He’s lightyears beyond Armando in terms of character and intellectual firepower.

Armando and his pack are living in a fantastical dreamworld in which they’re the only sane ones and everyone who dares to criticize them is insane.

Yes, you know us screeching feminist harridans – if we only got laid by the Frat Boys, everything would be OK.

It’s just a bizarre place. There are a lot of decent people – I hear from them in email – but they don’t speak up. The ones that do have the courage to do so are brutally attacked. I see a couple of them now being called “the new hrh” by BTDT, and being pounced on by the Bully Brigade. It’s obvious where that’s going 😛

yes very true … Many people are too intimidated to speak up. Or, LOL they want IN…. 😉

And iwth the likes of AGG, and others… playing up to the Boyz and issuing barely veiled warnings.. well it long ago (years, firmly entrenched for the 04 run) moved to a shunning society.

The so called “Liberal blogs” are basically amputees wandering in an absolute bare subsistence desert (for several of them their numbers are cresting downward for months) due to being wholly owned by the party, and factions within. IMO they moved on Lieberman to establish some sort of ‘Bully within’ operative games.. but failed. They now think they can take Tauscher down.

So back to FP extortion games. And working to be a bundler of cash. And hiring out, seems that Edwards is current customer… It is a business model in a certain sort of political world, in the US and elsewhere…

Proabably the most hilarious thing in years is watching campaign operatives selling themselves as a “movement”…

I just read one of Stoller’s ( MyDD ) long interminable mental shits about The Left and The Sixties. He seems to miss that Big Business runs this country and in the person of Bob Strauss (Texas Dem, DNC chair as of 72) – and others – the left lost any hope of a political partner as of ’72. the list of candidates he claims spring from the left (what a joke) sprang from Bob Strauss and his ilk.

Unlike how the Republicans and aspects of Big Biz and religionists and the hard Western Right that rose with Nixon (widdle pwogs love to call him “liberal”) and Reagan and Goldwater held on for another day.

All this is very interesting. I’d noticed a lot of bullying and suck-uppery on Daily Kos, but I hadn’t specifically related it to the issue of gender relations. Reading this, and hrh’s suicide-by-TR thread on the orange site has been very enlightening.

It wasn’t “suicide by TR”. It was a gang attack. There were only a couple of postings I made that were remotely TRable. The rest were normal comments that the jackboot squad TRed to trigger the autoban.

And you know what, the much-vaunted new “warning” system – where, supposedly, the admins put you on a temporary ban to “cool off” – is a big fat lie. I never received any warning from anybody. It was plain that they didn’t like my attitude, and their tiny minds were blown when I stood up to Kos the Great and Powerful and told him off to his virtual face. Ooh. Can’t have THAT. Quick, get rid of her.

That’s some seriously sick stuff at the clockwork place. Really, the best thing for all concerned would be for it to shut down; there’s just too much bad history for it ever to be a healthy place. In any case, hrh/Heather and Miss Devore, pardon my cliche, but the clockwork’s loss is Marisacat’s gain.

Oh thre is probably a purge coming. They luv to maintain a ‘strategy of tension”…

I loved it when there as a big big one – a couple of years ago, Kos denied it, but wilfred heard from a different site with some contacts to Red State that the Krempasky Tacitus crowd was discussing ”the purge at Kos”. Having heard it from little lui-meme.

LOL… Either you are red in the open or like a lot of the big Dem sites… you lean red.

Damn, hrh’s post sure toppled the display at the end of that aisle. Lord, I haven’t seen that much management and “help” run down an aisle, for a clean up, in years. Ya really gotta punch some buttons to get Kos to post 20 times to one thread. LOL.

I wonder why Kos found it necessary? He usually leaves the cleanup to the “help”. The only thing I can figure is he wanted to send a clear message to the “help” (and others) that the gloves are off. From the wolf packing that has taken place since that post, it looks like the message was received. Appears like another big purge is in the works. Is it being driven by his business plan, the “investors” or both? It has a panicky feel to it.

Armando is on a tear, ain’t he. He’s picked up the banner, his keyboard and, from the look and tone of his post, a bottle and charged fearlessly into the fray. LOL. God, he’s entertaining asshole.

I find it very interesting that Edwards is wooing people like Robert Scoble. Scoble is a bit outside the Blue Majority (formerly known as Netroots) circle. Maybe Edwards is just trying to widen his demographics. Get some of that hi-tech money. Not get tied too closely to one corner of the internet. 😉

So.

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Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.